Ideally, rather than have a central authority dictating what software the people of the world may or may not run on their servers
This is not about central authority by any means. What authority do I have? Probably less than nothing. Just a mere suggestion to make Hive truer to its marketed virtue enough for people not to say “well we never really thought about that”, “that is not in the spirit of Hive”, “why make Hive like that”, etc. Until then I'll keep searching for the slivers of gem that so far we have not seen
Hive isn't dead or gone and I think it is possible to find the sweet spot somewhere in. Right now I really doubt that every user for all practical purposes will notice this. But I don't think there is any way to make this more pleasant and meaningful than simply repeating that this is the only way to run a honey badger of blockchain P2P